Amit Shirodkar's blog.
This blog has 2 parts:
1) My own thoughts on a variety of subjects.
2) A collection of links, stories, articles, etc. that I found on the web, liked and wanted to share with others.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

10 tips for time management in a multitasking world

Timemanagement is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but youhave to learn. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’torganize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn’t matterhow skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your workdone.

Younger workers understand this, and time management is becoming atopic of hipsters. One of the most popular blogs in the world is Lifehacker, edited by productivity guru Gina Trapani, and her forthcoming book by the same name is a bestseller on Amazon based so far on pre-orders.

In today’s workplace, you can differentiate yourself by your abilityto handle information and manage your time. “Careers are made or brokenby the soft skills that make you able to hand a very large workload,”says Merlin Mann, editor of the productivity blog 43 Folders.

So here are 10 tips to make you better at managing your work:

1. Don’t leave email sitting in your in box.

“The ability to quickly process and synthesize information and turn itinto actions is one of the most emergent skills of the professionalworld today,” says Mann. Organize email in file folders. If the messageneeds more thought, move it to your to-do list. If it’s for reference,print it out. If it’s a meeting, move it to your calendar.

“One thing young people are really good at is only touching thingsonce. You don’t see young people scrolling up and down their emailpretending to work,” says Mann. Take action on an email as soon as youread it.

2. Admit multitasking is bad.

For people who didn’t grow up watching TV, typing out instant messages and doing homework all at the same time, multitasking is deadly. But it decreases everyone’s productivity,no matter who they are. “A 20-year-old is less likely to feeloverwhelmed by demands to multitask, but young people still have a lossof productivity from multitasking,” says Trapani.

Trapani calls this “running a morning dash”. When she sitsdown to work in the morning, before she checks any email, she spends anhour on the most important thing on her to-do list. This is a greatidea because even if you can’t get the whole thing done in an hour,you’ll be much more likely to go back to it once you’ve gotten itstarted. She points out that this dash works best if you organize thenight before so when you sit down to work you already know what yourmost important task of the day is.

4. Check your email on a schedule.

“It’s not effective to read and answer every email as it arrives. Justbecause someone can contact you immediately does not mean that you haveto respond to them immediately,” says Dan Markovitz, president of the productivity consulting firm TimeBack Management,“People want a predictable response, not an immediate response.” So aslong as people know how long to expect an answer to take, and they knowhow to reach you in an emergency, you can answer most types of emailjust a few times a day.

5. Keep web site addresses organized.

Use book marking services like del.icio.usto keep track of web sites. Instead of having random notes about placesyou want to check out, places you want to keep as a reference, etc.,you can save them all in one place, and you can search and share yourlist easily.

6. Know when you work best.

Industrial designer Jeff Beenedoes consulting work, so he can do it any time of day. But, he says, “Itry to schedule things so that I work in the morning, when I am themost productive.” Each person has a best time. You can discover yoursby monitoring your productivity over a period of time. Then you need tomanage your schedule to keep your best time free for your mostimportant work.

7. Think about keystrokes.

If you’re on a computer all day, keystrokes matter becauseefficiency matters. “On any given day, an information worker will do adozen Google searchers,” says Trapani. “How many keystrokes does ittake? Can you reduce it to three? You might save 10 seconds, but overtime, that builds up.”

8. Make it easy to get started.

We don’t have problems finishing projects, we have problemsstarting them,” says Mann. He recommends you “make a shallow on-ramp.”Beene knows the key creating this on ramp: “I try to break own myprojects into chunks, so I am not overwhelmed by them.”

9. Organize your to-do list every day.

If you don’t know what you should be doing, how can you manage yourtime to do it? Some people like writing this list out by hand becauseit shows commitment to each item if you are willing to rewrite it eachday until it gets done. Other people like software that can slice anddice their to-do list into manageable, relevant chunks. For example,Beene uses tasktoybecause when he goes to a client site tasktoy shows him only his to doitems for that client, and not all his other projects. (Get tasktoy here.)

10. Dare to be slow.

Remember that a good time manager actually responds to some things moreslowly than a bad time manager would. For example, someone who is doingthe highest priority task is probably not answering incoming emailwhile they’re doing it. As Markovitz writes: “Obviously there are moreimportant tasks than processing email. Intuitively, we all know this.What we need to do now is recognize that processing one’s work(evaluating what’s come in and how to handle it) and planning one’swork are also mission-critical tasks.”